


Ashes to Ashes, Anger to Anger

by Bennet_Doyeni



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, spoilers through ep 73
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-22
Updated: 2016-11-22
Packaged: 2018-08-31 22:44:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8596681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bennet_Doyeni/pseuds/Bennet_Doyeni
Summary: At Grog's wake, Keyleth remembers the ways in which the Goliath as been there for her.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is a part of the Crit Role Bang, and the original post can be found here, along with the artwork that inspired it: http://voxmachinamusicfestival.tumblr.com/post/153521850197/ashes-to-ashes-anger-to-anger

     I.  Envy 

“Keyleth, I don’t want to hear your apologies” The goliath says, arms crossed.  
“Listen, Grog, I didn’t mean it like that” Keyleth, pleading.  
“Oh? How did you mean ‘massacre waiting to happen’?”  
“Grog, you know-”  
“Yeah Keyleth I do know, I know my axe can hit one person at a time, two if they’re smallish, you, with your magic shit you can hit at least six people at a time.”  
“You’re right Grog, and that terrifies me.” Surprised by the conformation of his rightness, Grog’s arms drop, and his pout softens.  
“You’re… Scared?”  
“And jealous.”  
“Jealous, of who?” The goliath scratches his head, wondering who Keyleth, of all people could possibly be jealous of.  
“Of all of you, and you especially Grog, the way you can just plunge into whatever you’re doing without a second thought”  
“Keyleth-“  
“Grog, I’ve been so angry,” here the small druid’s body stiffens, and her eyes change (ever so slightly, but Grog notices), “ever since Pyrah, and Raishon, I don’t know if I’ll be able to control it, or if I’ll lash out and end up hurting someone I love.” Grog drops to one knee as Keyleth’s eyes start to water, and he remembers a time that he hurt someone that he loves. He pulls her into a crushing hug, having no more words, quarrel forgotten. 

❧❧❧

     II.  Eulogy 

They are somber, all those who the goliath’s giant life has touched. Vox Machina is there, of course, those who are left. Willhand, who Grog saved and who saved Grog. Cassandra, Trish, Kynan, and a full complement of Whitestone guards. Allura and Kima, Gilmore and Jarett, Seeker Assum (the real one), and the staff of Greyskull Keep. Earthbreaker Groon, Zhara, Kash, and a company of friends and admirers from Vasselheim. Even Zanror and Shale and the Herd of Storms have come here to Westruun to honor a hero of their line, now fallen.

It is Pike who stands first, ascending the short stairs to the top of the dais where the body rests on its pyre. She stands there looking out over the assembled mourners, for long minutes, she starts to speak a few times, but the words seem to stick in her throat, until finally, she begins

“Grog was my best friend, he was my brother, he was the sword to my shield.” A long, wet pause, “And now, he has gone on to join the bravest warriors and the finest cobblers. Cord’s strength my friend, my brother, half-my-heart.” She turns to hide her tears, but the tree-trunk like legs that her muscles move toward are not behind her, they are on the wood in front of her, and this is too much for her.

Next is Scanlan, who is holding himself together with a wall of humor, cold as ice. “Grog, we’ll miss you friend.” He looks like he might fall apart for a moment, then he takes a deep breath and pulls himself together. “Friends, let me tell you a story about the behemoth of sexual prowess that you see before you. One time he and I were in a- well, we were in a ‘house of lady favors’ as he called them...” Scanlan gets them all laughing, because of course he does, and the mood changes, from heartbroken mourning, to something more nostalgic, and the gathering becomes a celebration of Grog’s life, and Scanlan steps down, his part done.

After Scanlan is Vex with a story about Grog’s accounting prowess, and then Vax recounts the high points of their prank war, followed by Percy, followed by Kima, and on and on. Stories are told, tears shed and the mourners stand outside Westruun, outside Grog’s home, putting him back together, piece by piece, with their memories, until he stands there, in each of their minds as large in death and memory as he was in life. As the shadows cast by the houses of Westruun begin to encroach on the mourners, Keyleth finally steps up to the pyre.

❧❧❧

     III.  Rage 

Keyleth feels Grog behind her and takes another breath, she can feel her heart pounding in her chest, can tell that her face is as red as the flames she wishes she could breathe right now.  
“You want to feel the burning inside of you? ohh you’ll feel it Raishon, but it will not be from Thordak or whatever cure he made up, no, the burning you feel will be from the souls of ten thousand fire ashari as they sear flesh from your bones, and the last thing you see will be my face as I watch you suffer. You want us to trust you? Burn in hell.”  
“Child, your anger is mis-”  
“CALL ME CHILD ONE MORE GODDAMN TIME.”

Raishon appears unfazed, but Keyleth can see the effect of her words on the faces of her family. can feel it in Grog’s hand on her shoulder, she’s toed a line she’s never touched before.

❧❧❧

After the fight with Vorugal, on their way to the basement, Grog takes Keyleth by the shoulder,  
“What you did back there, in Whitestone, with Raishon, that was good.”  
“What I did could have gotten us all killed,” she shakes his hand off, “It was rash, and it is what I’ve been afraid of for so long, that one day I’m going to breath fire and burn everything down.”  
“Now, I’m not saying worked particularly well, or that it wasn’t dangerous, I’m saying it was good --  for you. You’re gonna be a leader right?”  
“Well, yes-”  
“Then you gotta know when your needs outweigh the needs of the herd. I think you learned a lot about how to judge that back there.”  
“I don’t think that’s what I’m supposed to be learning.” Her shoulders slump and Grog can see that she hasn’t understood, communicating can be so _hard_ when people don’t want to understand you. He changes tact.  
“Listen, we’re all here right? Raishon helped us, Whitestone is still there, right?”  
“Right.”  
“So your little fire breathing stunt didn’t do any harm, and would you have been ok, with yourself that is, if you hadn’t gone off on her?”  
“I suppose, thanks Grog.”

❧❧❧

     IV. Reflection

They all look up at her, standing at the head of the pyre, and she lowers her head. She takes a deep breath and looks out over her friends.  
“Life leads to death, and this is the way of things, what is born must die. But the path is not a lonely one, one person’s life can influence those around them, can bend their path towards or away from good, or even lengthen or shorten those paths. In this way Grog was a gardener, pruning some of those paths so that others could flourish. Sorry, that got confusing, what I’m saying is that Grog did what he could to make the world better, however he could.”

The sunset is beginning in earnest now, and Keyleth can feel the cool of night on her bare arms, she lights her hands, and feels the flames warmth spread up through her body, she raises her now flaming arms.

“Some say that souls are born in flames, I say that Grog lived life like a flame, and to the flames I now return him.”

She lowers her arms slowly, until they rest on either side of Grog’s head, she looks down at him and whispers, too softly for anyone else to hear. “goodbye my friend, I love you.” She slowly walks around the pyre, leaving a trail of flames that spreads out until the oncoming night’s chill has been fully banished.

The flames rise into the night and Keyleth stands with her family, Vax rests a hand on her shoulders, they stand there watching the sparks fly up and mingle with the stars, and Keyleth reflect on how apt it is that flames be Grog’s final legacy, at once wild and tame, dangerous and safe, harmful and helpful. What else could sum up the collection of contradictions that made up the person whom she had trusted with those things that she had trusted no one else. Eventually the silence broke, and casks of ale were broken open, and solemnity was balanced with celebration for the second time that night.

❧❧❧

     V. Family

They found the ‘letter’ the day before the cremation, it was under his pauldron, a carefully folded scrap of carefully painted vellum (the advantage to a large shoulder is that it leaves room for a large will). They were all there in a line: Pike knelt over his body (he drew her with her astral wings), his head cradled in her lap his intent clear ‘you decide what happens to me’, Scanlan next to her (a crude flute at his belt), Grog’s axe beneath him ‘to you I give my strength’, then Vex (a hulking bear over her shoulder) and two pouches, the bag of holding and his personal purse ‘to you I return our possessions’, Next to her is her brother and under him a crude drawing (whether it is a statement on Vax’s character, or the part of Grog which he bequeathed to Vax I will leave to the reader’s imagination), Percy next (the de Rolo crest floating in the air above his head), under him a smaller drawing of the seven of them ‘you were my family’, and Keyleth, nearly all the way across the page from where Grog had drawn his body (her antlered tiara like horns coming out of her head), beneath her was the hardest glyph for the rest of Vox Machina to interpret, a green dragon, covered in flames. Keyleth knows what it means though.

❧❧❧

“How do you keep it suppressed when it's not needed?” She had asked him,

“A good question,” He had answered, “it all comes down to one word really, family. Before I was a part of this group I had no family, then pike took me in, i met all of you, i had a purpose. So before that like, i would be down to fuck anything up at anytime, no problem, (I still kind of am), but I realize that if I fly off the handle too soon it screws over my family, and that’s no good because I care about you. Most of you.”

“Right,” She had said, but now she understands,

“So for me you‘re gonna get yours it's coming and i'm gonna help you and i'm gonna high five you when it's done, but until then you keep that shit tucked inside, let it build, and when the time is right you let her have it.”

❧❧❧

     VI. Forward

When morning came and his pyre was nothing more than ash and cinders, when all the other mourners had retreated to their beds, Keyleth stood alone outside the town, watching the light of the coals fade in the dawn’s light. One coal though, was not a coal, but a red-hot piece of metal, one of the loops which had held his pauldron to his shoulder and therefore a loop which had held his will to his arm. Compelled by that same passion which had caused her to take a memento off Tiberius’ robe, she reaches her hand into the coals and pulls out this loop, flinching as the red-hot metal sears her hand (she has burned worse). A whispered word and the loop cools to a grey steel, she slips it over her wrist, a crude iron bracelet to remind her of her iron friend. Her watch and wake completed, she turns her back to the coals and turns towards the city, where embers have so recently been stirred into new life.

❧❧❧

Years later, when she is an old woman, even for a druid of her stature, she still wears the bracelet. It has been polished by the years, and she has etched designs into it with worry and heat, but it is still the same piece of metal, still a link to her friend. And at the end of her life, when she begins her journey into the astral plane to join all those she has loved and lost in her long years, she leaves behind six items, carefully protected from the ravages of time. The bracelet is the second of these.

**Author's Note:**

> I swear I started this before episode 73, and then Marisha and Travis just jumped in and took the words right out of my mouth. I'm not even mad.


End file.
